Meet Benoit Courréges, affectionately named Bruno, chief of police in a small village in the South of France where the rituals of the café still rule. A former soldier, Bruno has embraced the slow rhythms of country life. But the murder of an elderly North African who fought in the French army galvanizes his attention: the man had a swastika carved into his chest. When a visiting scholar helps untangle the dead man's past, Bruno's suspicions turn...

Welcoming the return of spring in his idyllic French village, chief of police Bruno Courrèges investigates a local murder at an archaeological dig site that is complicated by an animal rights clash and an international summit.

July 2005. In the Pyrenees mountains near Carcassonne, Alice, a volunteer at an archaeological dig, stumbles into a cave and makes a startling discovery-two crumbling skeletons, strange writings on the walls, and the pattern of a labyrinth. Eight hundred years earlier, on the eve of a brutal crusade that will rip apart southern France, a young woman named Alais is given a ring and a mysterious book for safekeeping by her father. The book, he says,...

"When an actor in a local play is attacked during the performance, Bruno must learn whether it was an accident, a crime of passion--or an assassination attempt with implications far beyond the small French village"--